Pharma.org is a despicable bunch of greedy scumbags, running ads on TV, threatening to cut research and development on new drugs if congress passes the Inflation Reduction Bill, which gives Medicare the right to negotiate prices for drugs. Well, fuck them, it passed. Now we’ll have to sit back and wait to see if a major American industry will prove its absolute lack of morals by actually doing what they have threatened.
It’s the kind of threat that a criminal punk makes against a small businessman from whom he wants a weekly piece of the action.
But that’s how big Pharma has always worked. For decades the government financed, through a series of grants, most of medical R & D on vaccines for diseases that are not likely to sell huge numbers of doses, That’s why deadly jungle diseases, which have been killing for years but not enough each year to vaccinate an entire population, have never had vaccines developed. “Give us a disease,” the big drug companies say, “that will sell several million doses of vaccine and we’ll have a cure on the market by next week.”
That’s how we got a COVID vaccine so fast and why we have never achieved an Ebola vaccine.
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The FBI’s search and seizure at Mar-a-Lago has the GOP up in arms, but the boxes of stuff the FBI carried out of Trump’s clubhouse are certainly damning. What the hell was Trump doing with all this critical material? He’s simply not bright enough to understand what most of it is about. Having watched the Donald over the years we must assume he was probably planning to sell the nuclear information to the highest bidder, but that’s just a good guess based on our experience with the cheap crook that actually ran this country for too long a time. More to the point, Trump probably just took the materials because he felt he was entitled to do anything he wanted as President.
The reaction from the Rabid Right has been swift and already deadly. All the Trump ass kissers making their usual noise seem to have prompted one nut to attack an FBI headquarters in Cincinnati and get himself blown away in the process. There will be more of this unless the losers in Congress who are blabbering about armed insurrection shut the fuck up.
It isn’t difficult for a reasonably good speaker to incite the Red Neck hoard. These guys have been hiding their automatic weapons for years, mumbling incoherently about taking back their country.
And speaking about “their country,” how the hell did they get that idea? Last time I looked these ignorant clowns made up about 20% of the voters in this country. How does that make it theirs? Maybe they should ask themselves how come 80% of the population thinks they are crazy?
The main problem still rests with the elected officials who are more interested in keeping a good paying job in government than they are in serving the people. The concept of service has gone so far out the window that we are now faced with a potential Speaker of the House like Kevin McCarthy, who lies about everything but his name.
Politics, in general, in this country, has definitely degenerated into chaos but that’s especially true for the GOP because of Trump’s interference in their primaries. He has backed some of the most unqualified candidates for office since he last ran himself. People like Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia and Kari Lake in Arizona are certainly not qualified for anything more demanding than cleaning port-o-sans. But some of them may get in office, as did Marjorie Taylor Green and any Texas governor in the last century. That will be the destruction of Government and the end of democracy.
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This week CBS Sunday Morning took us on a trip to Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. It’s really a little southern town called Mount Airy that has become a huge tourist attraction dragging many thousands, mostly southern or rural folks to a myth that never existed or if you will, a TV show that died way back in the misty past.
I mention this because lately I have been hearing far too much about how America has changed for the worse, and how people wish for the old America that was epitomized by fantasies like “Mayberry.”
Well, I’m really old and I can tell you for a fact that Mayberry’s America only existed on TV shows like the one Andy Griffith made popular. America and the rest of the world have always been home to people who were hateful, bigoted and generally awful humans. That’s just the way it always has been and unfortunately, the way it probably always will be, because however man got to this earth, he arrived a damaged vehicle and no one has managed to figure out how to fix the damn carburetor.
Everybody is always talking about “the good old days.” Bullshit! I lived in “the good old days,” at least a significant part of them, and they weren’t much better than today. The people, who lived in them wit\h me, just like the people now, were always talking about “the good old days” before WWII and 1929. I guess those folks forgot about about all the wars, slavery, prohibition and the massacre of hundreds of Indian tribes and all kinds of other awful things that one human did to another that had gone on all the way back to the beginning of time.
I was a teenager and college student in the 1950’s when blacks were marching and being beaten simply for being black. I was arrested in Covington, Georgia for hitchhiking with a Jew. I don’t remember if that was the formal charge but it was certainly the factual one. My hometown in New Jersey had an area called “Little Texas,” which housed only black families and factories. The public high school had a beautiful campus, better than many colleges. It had an Olympic sized swimming pool that had been filled with desks because the white parents in town didn’t want their kids swimming with black kids.
Things didn’t get any better in the 60’s. I remember touring with a Shakespearian Repertory Company, doing one-night stands throughout the country. We rolled into a tiny town in Mississippi; couldn’t have been more than a couple of thousand residents, asking for the small black college where we were to appear that night. No one recognized the name of the school until I told one old guy that it was a Negro teaching college.
“Oh,” he drawled. “You mean Nigga Normal.” No white person in that miserable little town knew it by any other name.
When John F. Kennedy was shot in Texas, half the citizens of that despicable state partied, because the Irish Catholic President had been killed. If Kennedy had been a protestant, Texans would have loved him simply for his warlike nature.
So yeah, things don’t really change much. A busload of Mount Airy tourists were interviewed by the Sunday Morning segment’s host and they turned out to be almost 100% Trumpers. Their answers were filled with false information and repetition of the lies they had been fed by the Trump machine. There was absolutely no evidence of any critical thought. One woman kept repeating how she loved President Trump. What’s to love? Has she looked at him lately? Has she listened; rally listened, to what he is saying? Interestingly enough they all harkened back to those “good old days” when everyone was nice. Sure, they were nice, nice bigots and nice idiots but definitely nice. Unfortunately it takes more than nice to drive the car.
Amen again!!!!!!!! It was considered better times, because there was more complacency by those that are touting “it was better times”, but not by the victims of the huge oppression of many and of the bad status quo. The others thinking it was better times, naively lived in safe areas but who never hitchiked with a Jew, or knew there was a college referred to as “Nigger Normal”!!! For much of my growing up, I was one of those who thought everyone lived the same as I.
Thanks, Deseta. They were a good deal painful — those “good olds.” Same experience, same time; different parts of the country. My section was right in the heart of the centered heart of hate — and lack of knowledge (read ignorance, happily so).
Let’s hope the Trumpers et al can’t water it (government price control of Pharma) down any more. Tired of paying for all the research they claim.
Snar
I loved the phrase “rally listened”